The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Georg Hegel · en
ii. The _second_ art in which the romantic type realizes itself is
contrasted with painting, and is music. Its medium, though still
sensuous, yet develops into still more thorough subjectivity and
particularization. Music, too, treats the sensuous as ideal, and does
so by negating,[175] and idealizing into the individual isolation of a
single point, the indifferent externality[176] of space, whose complete
semblance is accepted and imitated by painting. The single point, _qua_
such a negativity (excluding space) is in itself a concrete and active
process of positive negation[177] within the attributes of matter, in
the shape of a motion and tremor of the material body within itself and
in its relation to itself. Such an inchoate ideality of matter,[178]
which appears no longer as under the form of space, but as temporal
ideality,[179] is sound, the sensuous set down as negated, with its
abstract visibility converted into audibility, inasmuch as sound, so to
speak, liberates the ideal content from its immersion in matter. This
earliest inwardness of matter and inspiration of soul into it furnishes
the medium for the mental inwardness--itself as yet indefinite,--and
for the soul[180] into which mind concentrates itself; and finds
utterance in its tones for the heart with its whole gamut of feelings
and passions. Thus music forms the centre of the romantic arts, just
as sculpture represents the central point between architecture and
the arts of romantic subjectivity. Thus, too, it forms the point of
transition between abstract spatial sensuousness, such as painting
employs, and the abstract spirituality of poetry. Music has within
itself, like architecture, a relation of quantity conformable to the
understanding, as the antithesis to emotion and inwardness; and has
also as its basis a solid conformity to law on the part of the tones,
of their conjunction, and of their succession.